GutterPutter

The Texas-originated band fronted by Will Sheff tackles the heartbreaks of romance in its oft-poetic, yet tragic ways through dependency.

This year, I was originally planning on writing a retrospective piece on Okkervil River, a Texas-based indie rock/folk band which is the project of singer-songwriter Will Sheff. It’ll be on their most notable album titled Black Sheep Boy which was released on the 4th of April 2005 which is just about twenty years ago. There are however some big “collusion” with my review on Black Country, New Road and Will Smith. That, alongside my piece on Disco Elysium: Locust City and a work-in-progress Capsule Review piece, pushes the retrospective article well over the “deadline”. That, and I forgot the exact date of it in addition.

For the band themselves, it is well worth noting that one of their most peculiar traits revolve around the way that they tackle the theme of love. I don’t think that they are the kind that would write love songs like Badly Drawn Boy or Death Cab for Cuties. Rather, they are the ones that would wallow in the ones that never came to fruition. Black Sheep Boy exemplifies this notion a lot through the ways that it intertwines anecdotal tales of self-destruction and addiction with vengeful or pitiful recounts of romance that failed. Even in other albums, tracks like ‘It Ends With a Fall’ sought to capture the introspective bitterness that comes with the loss of love.

Such wallowness, if there is an apparent pattern to discern, originates from the proactiveness of the female love interest. There is a definite kind of contrast that is felt when compared to many of the love songs, maybe even breakup songs, where Okkervil River’s direction seeks to portray many of its voices as being out of touch with their love interest’s independence. Implicitly toxic, hopelessly dependent, or otherwise melodramatic, much of the band’s representation of the relationship holds the voice accountable for the lack of recognition given to their liberty to not be with them.

A way to start this off is through ‘Listening to Otis Redding at Home During Christmas’ from their first album, 2002’s Don’t Fall in Love with Everyone You See. Its premise is about pining for someone who is not around for Christmas. Maybe she might never come back at all. Much of the language in the song rests on nostalgia. Past tenses are fraught whether the ex was addressed to compared to the current time of the festive season – “Where I held you so tenderly / And where in summer I opened your letter to me” compared to “It is Christmastime and the plane flies me over white hills / To a town in a dream where the sky, it is frozen and still”. What is notable is the apparition-like description of her being free to “float room to room like a ghost”. It offers a funereal impression that the feeling lingers on even though her absence is permanent. 

When there arrives the stinger that she’s “living in Georgia since last September”, the geographic distance between the two US states with the later-mentioned “New Hampshire” highlights the distance in chemistry that borders on unfixable. For a double meaning, Georgia could even refer to a country instead which implies her gradual change beyond compatibility to the voice’s desires especially if it seems to be over a year since her move.

In Black Sheep Boy, failed relationships are embedded with drug addiction and dependency as exemplified by the titular “Black Sheep Boy”. Do note that this is named after Tim Hardin’s song where, dealing with the desire for redemption from self-sabotage, the voice there calls for “Pretty girls with faces fair” to look at his “shine” in the chorus. Tracks like ‘For Real’ blurs the line between violent fantasies and sexual favours which infers misogynistic or perverse abuse of power for harassment. ‘Black’ follows on that by imagining a scenario where a self-imposed act of vengeance was pressured on the love interest to deal with their past as a sexual abuse victim from her father. 

Otherwise, tracks like ‘A Stone’ and ‘Song of Our So-Called Friend’ seek to show unrequited love through irony. Inspired quite likely by the folk tale of the Stone Soup, the songs urge caution on the offense taken at not being loved for extravagant gestures or gifts in favour of mutual chemistry or affective events. Male suitors are negatively alluded to as a “pebble” compared to Sheff’s narrator who tried to do everything to win over the love interest’s attention. This tends to be portrayed through a faux sense of proactiveness where the voice incidentally relies on shallow assumptions on preferences like the “loveliest words whispered and meant” on the former. Or, in the case of ‘Song of Our So-Called Friend’, a performative act of being a housewife – “So proceed out the door and down the street / December’s lying near but in the oven’s heat this house is now a home”.

The songs that concern love rely on unreliable narration which is to say that it depends on the subtext surrounding the ex’s feelings. ‘It Ends With a Fall’ from 2003’s Down the River of Golden Dreams saw its lyrics start with a conflict with memory – “Wish I could remember why it mattered to me / It doesn’t matter to me / It doesn’t matter to me anymore”. In the midst of jealousy that the love interest is moving on without him, the narrator instead tried to prove his loyalty to the point of codependency:

“You want to cut me off

Because I took too much

But don’t leave me alone

Take off your scarves, your winter coat

The night’s too cold”

Seemingly out of the blue, the lyrics has a more stream-of-conscious approach with its smidge of grammatical error (“How all that kiss her just seem”), abstract references to certain personal events, and dream-like journey to accepting its end. Yet, even at the end, the voice instead chooses to hold on to his love interest, whom he claimed he should have seen as being “like a sister” in retrospect, even if it means giving up his independence. That, he would perhaps accept, as marking the “end with a fall”.

What a lot of the songs there would eventually hint at is the control enjoyed by the love interest because she ultimately finds herself unshackled to the need of commitment. While the narrators find themselves preoccupied with the need to prove their en-quote “worthiness”, the love interest is not obliged to accept it. No matter how much they describe their actions, the power to start a relationship rests with the love interest who can reject it out if they simply can’t reciprocate with them. This subverts a lot of the love songs where the pitiful “I love you” comes plenty no matter the context. 

Instead, from Okkervil River’s perspective, much of these feelings of love are only limited to the person experiencing them. It is up to their crush to reciprocate and there should be no pressure on them to start a relationship if they do not want to. If anything, to give in would at best net no catharsis to the lovestruck person. There is a certain subversion in intent where Sheff does not encourage the acceptance of romance as a sole reason if it’s only one-sided. Instead, as he hinted in ‘Calling And Not Calling My Ex’ from 2008’s The Stand Ins, love demands the exact kind of circumstance for the relationship to succeed. Otherwise, like the ex on TV, it would only remain as an image destined for breaking hearts.